Best Ringtones

9.15.2007

The age-old business of breaking up has taken a decidedly Orwellian turn, with digital evidence like e-mail messages, traces of Web site visits and mobile telephone records now permeating many contentious divorce cases.

Divorce lawyers routinely set out to find every bit of private data about their clients’ adversaries, often hiring investigators with sophisticated digital forensic tools to snoop into household computers.

“In just about every case now, to some extent, there is some electronic evidence,” said Gaetano Ferro, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, who also runs seminars on gathering electronic evidence. “It has completely changed our field.”

Privacy advocates have grown increasingly worried that digital tools are giving governments and powerful corporations the ability to peek into peoples’ lives as never before. But the real snoops are often much closer to home.

“Google and Yahoo may know everything, but they don’t really care about you,” said Jacalyn F. Barnett, a Manhattan-based divorce lawyer. “No one cares more about the things you do than the person that used to be married to you.”

Most of these stories do not end amicably. This year, a technology consultant from the Philadelphia area, who did not want his name used because he has a teenage son, strongly suspected his wife was having an affair. Instead of confronting her, the husband installed a $49 program called PC Pandora on her computer, a laptop he had purchased.

The program surreptitiously took snapshots of her screen every 15 seconds and e-mailed them to him. Soon he had a comprehensive overview of the sites she visited and the instant messages she was sending. Since the program captured her passwords, the husband was also able to get access to and print all the e-mail messages his wife had received and sent over the previous year.

What he discovered ended his marriage. For 11 months, he said, she had been seeing another man — the parent of one of their son’s classmates at a private school outside Philadelphia. The husband said they were not only arranging meetings but also posting explicit photos of themselves on the Web and soliciting sex with other couples.

The husband, who like others in this article was reached through his lawyer, said the decision to invade his wife’s privacy was not an easy one. “If I were to tell you I have a pure ethical conscience over what I did, I’d be lying,” he said. But he also pointed to companies that have Internet policies giving them the right to read employee e-mail messages. “When you’re in a relationship like a marriage, which is emotional as well as, candidly, a business, I think you can look at it in the same way,” he said.

When considering invading their spouse’s privacy, husbands and wives cite an overriding desire to find out some secret. One woman described sensing last year that her husband, a Manhattan surgeon, was distant and overly obsessed with his BlackBerry.

She drew him a bubble bath on his birthday and then pounced on the device while he was in the tub. In his e-mail messages, she found evidence of an affair with a medical resident, including plans for them to meet that night.--Get any 15 ringtones for FREE!--A few weeks later, after the couple had tried to reconcile, the woman gained access to her husband’s America Online account (he had shared his password with her) and found messages from a mortgage company. It turned out he had purchased a $3 million Manhattan condominium, where he intended to continue his liaison.

“Every single time I looked at his e-mail I felt nervous,” the woman said. “But I did anyway because I wanted to know the truth.”

Being on the receiving end of electronic spying can be particularly disturbing. Jolene Barten-Bolender, a 45-year-old mother of three who lives in Dix Hills, N.Y., said that she was recently informed by AOL and Google, on the same day, that the passwords had been changed on two e-mail accounts she was using, suggesting that someone had gained access and was reading her messages. Last year, she discovered a Global Positioning System, or G.P.S., tracking device in a wheel well of the family car.

She suspects her husband of 24 years, whom she is divorcing.

“It makes me feel nauseous and totally violated,” Ms. Barten-Bolender said, speculating that he was trying to find out if she was seeing anyone. “Once anything is written down, you have to know it could be viewed by someone looking to invade or hurt you.”

Ms. Barten-Bolender’s husband and his lawyer declined to discuss her allegations.

Divorce lawyers say their files are filled with cases like these. Three-quarters of the cases of Nancy Chemtob, a divorce lawyer in Manhattan, now involve some kind of electronic communications. She says she routinely asks judges for court orders to seize and copy the hard drives in the computers of her clients’ spouses, particularly if there is an opportunity to glimpse a couple’s full financial picture, or a parent’s suitability to be the custodian of the children.

Lawyers must navigate a complex legal landscape governing the admissibility of this kind of electronic evidence. Different laws define when it is illegal to get access to information stored on a computer in the home, log into someone else’s e-mail account, or listen in on phone calls.

Divorce lawyers say, however, if the computer in question is shared by the whole family, or couples have revealed their passwords to each other, reading a spouse’s e-mail messages and introducing them as evidence in a divorce case is often allowed.

Lynne Z. Gold-Bikin, a Pennsylvania divorce lawyer, describes one client, a man, who believed his wife was engaging in secret online correspondence. He found e-mail messages to a lover in Australia that she had sent from a private AOL account on the family computer. Her lawyer then challenged the use of this evidence in court. Ms. Gold-Bikin’s client won the dispute and an advantageous settlement.

Lawyers say the only communications that are consistently protected in a spouse’s private e-mail account are the messages to and from the lawyers themselves, which are covered by lawyer-client privilege.

Perhaps for this reason, divorce lawyers as a group are among the most pessimistic when it comes to assessing the overall state of privacy in the digital age.

“I do not like to put things on e-mail,” said David Levy, a Chicago divorce lawyer. “There’s no way it’s private. Nothing is fully protected once you hit the send button.”

Ms. Chemtob added, “People have an expectation of privacy that is completely unrealistic.”

James Mulvaney agrees. A private investigator, Mr. Mulvaney now devotes much of his time to poking through the computer records of divorcing spouses, on behalf of divorce lawyers. One of his specialties is retrieving files, like bank records and e-mail messages to secret lovers, that a spouse has tried to delete.

9.14.2007

Cleverboy posted instructions on our forums on how to "convert" AAC music files to ringtones in iTunes 7.4. He states that ringtones and song files are only distinguished by file extension. The file extension for Ringtones is "M4R".

Windows and Mac

1. To add a ringtone to your iPhone, using Windows Explorer or Finder just duplicate and rename any AAC file with a "M4R" extension, then double-click on it. This file will be added to your iTunes library automatically. (Some are reporting a size limit for the music file, so if you have trouble, using a smaller file may help)

2. Now, click on your iPhone in iTunes, and go to the ringtone section. You should now see your new ringtone. If you want to be sure about the sync, feel free to click "selected ringtones" and check off the file explicitly, though this shouldn't be required.

3. Now SYNC your phone. You're Done!

Mac Notes

You have to make sure the actual extension is changed. The easiest way to make sure you are changing the extension is to use Command-I to "Get Info" on the file in Finder. Then change the extension in the "Name & Extension" field to "M4R". Finder may ask you if you are sure you want to change the extension. Once you double click, the file should show up in the Ringtone area in iTunes.

Windows Notes

Again, you need to make sure the actual extension is changed.

Opens My Computer, Then goes to Tools-Folder Options-View

UNCHECK "Hide extensions for known file types" once this is done you can simply rename the file with a new extension of M4R which then changes the Icon to say RING.

(Thanks Michael)

General Notes

- 3.1 MB in file size is the largest I can successfully transfer (so far) and have it work properly as a ringtone. - Sobe- Some people have had trouble deleting the ringtones once they are on their iPhone.- if you have previously installed Ringtones with iToner, iPhoneRingToneMaker etc... then you will lose those ringtones if you upgrade to iTunes 7.4. A fix for iToner is coming.- For those having trouble, there are two more step-by-step tutorials posted here and here. Another tutorial with photos.

If you’ve been missing Japanese monster movies, take heart. “Dragon Wars: D-War” (from South Korea actually) proves the genre quite alive. It is such a breathless, delirious stew, it’s impossible not to be entertained, provided — this is crucial — you have a sense of humor.

Hmmm, exposition. O.K. Centuries ago in Korea there were giant serpents called Imoogi. A bad one, Buraki, had armored troops. A girl, Narin, had this glowing bubble, the Yuh Yi Joo, which turns Imoogi into dragons. But she and her lover-protector, Haram, sacrificed themselves without giving it up.

Deep breath. In Los Angeles an eruption suggests something big has awakened, something cranky. When Ethan Kendrick (Jason Behr) finds out, he recalls being taught as a child by the mystic Jack (Robert Forster) that he is Haram reincarnated. Narin is now Sarah Daniels (Amanda Brooks). Exhale.

Baraki eats elephants, but he can’t outrun cars, which lets Ethan and Sarah reach New Mexico for a “Godzilla”-like rumble between Imoogi. “We’ll see each other again,” says Sarah to Ethan after the bout. Hoo-boy. Batten the hatches.

9.10.2007

The Steve may want you to cough up $2 for an iTunes track + ringtone but TUAW is watching out for your wallet. You already own the song. Use it the way you want. Here's a quick round-up of the ways you can save money on ringtones:

SendSong: This utility lets you pick any song from your iTunes library and use it as a ringtone. Do not use iTMS-purchased tracks as ringtones.

9.09.2007

If you were a man walking across the campus of Florida State University in 1978, an attractive young woman might have approached you and said these exact words: "I have been noticing you around campus. I find you to be attractive. Would you go to bed with me tonight?"

If you were that man, you probably would have thought that you had just gotten incredibly lucky. But not really. You were actually an unwitting subject in an experiment designed by the psychologist Russell Clark.

Clark had persuaded the students of his social psychology class to help him find out which gender, in a real-life situation, would be more receptive to a sexual offer from a stranger. The only way to find out, he figured, was to actually get out there and see what would happen. So young men and women from his class fanned out across campus and began propositioning strangers.--Get any 15 ringtones for FREE!--The results weren't very surprising. Seventy-five percent of guys were happy to oblige an attractive female stranger (and those who said no typically offered an excuse such as, "I'm married"). But not a single woman accepted the identical offer of an attractive male. In fact, most of them demanded the guy leave her alone.

At first the psychological community dismissed Clark's experiment as a trivial stunt, but gradually his experiment gained first acceptance, and then praise for how dramatically it revealed the differing sexual attitudes of men and women. Today it's considered a classic. But why men and women display such different attitudes remains as hotly debated as ever.